Friday, February 6, 2015

Bibi Stay Home!

So where's the demonstration by American Jews for whom Israel's
right to exist is utterly inarguable but who also completely oppose Netanyahu appearing
before Congress to mind-meld with the militaristic wing of the Republican Party
(is there another?) to overrule Obama's efforts to prevent Iran from getting nuclear
weapons?

There's no such demonstration planned?

Not even by J Street?

Why not?

I'm tempted to connect this dysfunction with another I've
come across: in a piece by a writer I generally like, in an article I otherwise
agreed with, I found the writer deriding Netanyahu’s summons to French Jews, in
the wake of Paris massacres, to move to Israel. Instead, he asserts in passing,
that Netanyahu should have offered to provide defense for Jews in the quote
unquote Diaspora.

This is utter madness.

A sign, insofar as I can make sense of it, that Jews who
don't live in Israel, and prefer not to, and in any case never will, have lost
all sense of self-defense.

Israel is not our protector out here in the rest of the
world. Israel can and must exist. It can and does serve as a legitimate haven,
as now for many French Jews.

But, to put it bluntly, the existence of the state of Israel
has in many ways made the rest of us, the eternal non-Israelis, weaker and less
defended than ever.

Is this situation post-Zionist? In some ways, it is pre-Zionist.
Zionism has come and in many ways gone, creating problems of its own.

The IDF is not coming to protect you in Paris, Toulouse, or,
God help us, New York City.